• zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    The original business plan of the website was to use bots to make the site look artificially active and popular. It's always been a bot farm run to churn engagement. Once it blew up in popularity, you didn't notice it as much. But now that its increasingly dominated by algorithm-driven ads and marketing campaigns, yeah. The engagement slides as it becomes more and more artificial. But the metrics keep rising, because more and more artificial content is injected into the site.